


Great Expectations

by moonlighten



Series: Rookery Downs [6]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-29
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-10-26 10:02:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10784598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlighten/pseuds/moonlighten
Summary: Dylan accompanies Lovino to the theatre. It's not a date, no matter what Dylan might wish to the contrary.





	Great Expectations

**Author's Note:**

> ... And hoping that posting this will give me the impetus needed to actually finish it, as I've been meaning to for a long, long time...

* * *

 

 

Although ‘dressing to impress’ should be one of the most easily achieved of Dylan’s goals for the evening, it’s somewhat hampered by the deficiencies of his wardrobe.  
  
Beyond his casual clothes – mostly drab, sporadically threadbare, and entirely out of date – and work clothes – occasionally approaching smart, but also drab and practical rather than flattering – he owns exactly two nice shirts, one decent tie, and The Suit.  
  
He’d bought The Suit with the last dregs of his trust fund upon graduating from Warwick. Bespoke from the tailor who used to make all of Granddad’s suits in more solvent times, it had been intended as an investment in his future, meant to impress at interviews and thereafter in whatever career he decided to pursue.  
  
After the first day of his first PGCE placement, The Suit had found sheltered retirement inside a suit bag and a late night dash to Tesco had furnished him with the four hard-wearing but significantly cheaper suits that he has continued to wear in rotation throughout his career thus far at Rookery Downs.  
  
He has only worn The Suit once since that day, when he was Arthur’s best man, and part of Dylan can’t help feeling that a simple trip to the theatre isn’t a suitably grand enough occasion to press it into service again.  
  
Most of him would be embarrassed to wear anything else.  
  
The very least reason is that Lovino is habitually better dressed for a day in his classroom or evening down the pub than Dylan thinks he has ever been in his life. The greatest, though, by quite a sizeable margin, is that he really does want to at least _try_ to impress.  
  
Because tonight may simply have arisen from the confluence of a previously unrevealed shared interest in musicals and Llewellyn’s unexpected generosity, and not an admittance of reciprocal attraction or invitation on an actual date, but it’s _something_. And Dylan hasn’t had as little as the barest brush with _something_ since even longer ago than the last wearing of The Suit.  
  
It could mean absolutely nothing more than it appears on the surface, but it could also be a chance to change _something_ into _more_. It’s unlikely, the longest of shots, but stranger things have happened. True, they never seem to happen to Dylan, but it can’t hurt to try and improve his odds slightly.  
  
He chooses the lighter blue of his two good shirts to go with his dark blue tie, which looks passable even to his critical eye until he – carefully and fastidiously – puts on The Suit, and discovers that he’s lost more weight than he’d realised since Arthur and Gabriella’s wedding.  
  
The waistband of the trousers slump down so low that they reveal a good portion of his boxers – plain grey cotton; he’s quietly optimistic that the evening might be something other than a complete disaster, but not delusional – and are only stopped from puddling to the floor entirely by the slightly more commodious than average dimensions of his arse. The jacket’s little better, roomy enough to fit his duffle coat beneath it instead of on top, and the ensemble as a whole makes him resemble a small child dressing up in their father’s clothes.  
  
Still, the cheap material all of his work suits are made from has become shiny with wear over the years, and all of his other trousers are fraying across the seat and flecked with paint, creosote or both thanks to Alasdair's demands on his free time, so he doesn’t have much option but to make the best of what he’s got.  
  
He winches The Suit’s trousers securely with a belt, which has the unfortunate side-effect of giving him an unsightly bulge around the middle on either side of it like he’s a balloon that’s being tightly squeezed, and slips a cardigan beneath the jacket to pad it out sufficiently that it stops sliding off his shoulders every time he moves his arms.  
  
After he’s buttoned his coat, he studies himself appraisingly in his one full-length mirror again. To his disappointment, he can’t see any appreciable difference between his appearance now and any given day that he was about to set off for school. Even his hair has settled itself into its usual haphazard snarl of curls, despite the ten quid he’d spent on a bottle of conditioner which a helpful assistant in Boots had promised him would be sure to tame it.  
  
“Jesus,” he sighs dejectedly, the slight confidence he’d managed to somehow maintain about his prospects beginning to trickle away.  
  
He’s half-tempted to call Lovino, pretend a sudden and violent bout of food poisoning – no, on second thoughts, a heavy cold might be better; far less likely to conjure up the sort of distasteful images Dylan has no desire for Lovino to entertain about him – then beg Llewellyn to rescind his kind gift of the tickets and attend the performance himself instead, because at least then _someone_ might get some pleasure out of—  
  
Dylan quickly and deliberately turns his back on the mirror, and, in an instant, his anxiety starts to fade. He closes his eyes, inhales deeply, and makes a concerted effort to push the rest aside.  
  
Affirmations have never helped – one of Cerys’ friends, a trainee counsellor, had sworn by them as an effective way of curing his ‘confidence issues’, but Dylan has never been able to persuade himself that he’s anything other than what his reflection shows; he’s not a skilled enough liar – but selective ignorance always does. He can’t pretend that he’s tall, or slim, or handsome, but choosing to forget he’s not is remarkably easy in comparison.  
  
By the time he releases his breath, the memory of what he’d seen is gone, replaced by the blank space that is his normal conception of his self-image, and he feels ready to leave the house.

 

 

* * *

 

  
  
After the forty-odd minute train journey to Liverpool, The Suit is so creased that it looks as though Dylan’s been sleeping in it for at least the past week, his shoes are coated in dust, and the inside of his duffle coat hood is sprinkled with fragments of crisps thanks to a small child who had mistaken it for a rubbish bin and deposited their half-empty packet into it.  
  
To add insult to injury, it starts raining the second Dylan steps foot outside the station. He eventually manages to wrestle his umbrella open despite the best efforts of the fierce wind howling down Lime Street, but it’s too late for his hair, which frizzes up so quickly that he can almost feel it expanding.  
  
Getting splashed by a car speeding through a puddle next to the pavement as he walks the few feet down the road to the Empire Theatre seems so much par for the course by that point that he barely even acknowledges it, even when the icy cold water starts soaking into his socks.  
  
In his rush and worry over perhaps being late, he’s actually arrived far too early. The theatre’s doors aren’t yet open and there’s a handful of people huddled up under the awnings outside them already, forming small clusters of laughter and conversation. Dylan passes them slowly, glancing at up at each face, but none of them are Lovino. He isn’t sure why he even bothered looking; Lovino’s struggles to even make his classes on time, and Dylan can’t imagine that tonight could possibly give him any more impetus towards punctuality than that.  
  
Dylan positions himself at the very end of the disorganised excuse for a queue, leans his back against the wall in an effort to shield himself from the worst of the weather, and tries to settle in for what he suspects will be a very long wait.

 

 

* * *

  
  
  
Half an hour later, the doors have opened and the waiting crowd has thinned to a steady trickle of people, all rushing inside with umbrellas and hoods – or newspapers and magazines, amongst the more obviously unprepared – over their heads to escape what has turned out to be a torrential downpour, water sluicing down in almost solid sheets.  
  
Dylan had decided to chance a crisp-crumb-covered head and pulled up his own hood once the collar of his shirt started soaking through, and he’s managed to keep the rest of his clothes relatively dry thanks to some judicious angling and positioning of his umbrella. Regardless, the tips of his fingers, toes and nose have started to go numb, as has his brain, anaesthetised by a stupefying mixture of stress and boredom.  
  
There’s only a very limited amount of entertainment to be found in reading and rereading the same four posters advertising current and forthcoming events at the theatre that are attached to the wall between the two sets of doors, and an ever increasing level of apprehension that can be built by the frequent checking of a mobile phone and watching the minutes after seven it displays climbing steadily higher whilst the number of missed call and text notifications stays resolutely at zero.  
  
Dylan takes his phone out of his coat pocket yet again nonetheless, because he has nothing better with which to occupy himself with, after all, and it’s become something of a compulsive habit by now, besides.  
  
Twelve minutes until the show starts, no missed calls, no text messages.  
  
Would calling Lovino to check on his whereabouts be a good idea? Dylan’s no closer to answering that question than he was the last ten times he stared blankly down at his phone’s screen and considered it.  
  
On the one hand, if he was sure Lovino was actually on his way, then perhaps he’d be able to give up his ridiculous outdoor vigil and move into the tempting warmth of the theatre’s foyer to continue his wait. His fear over being stood up is the only thing that’s kept him outside, as, by doing so, he at least leaves himself the option of slinking off home unseen if it does come to pass, and thereafter pretending to himself that he’d never travelled to Liverpool at all.  
  
It’s stupid and self-defeating – he’s likely the only one who would even notice the empty seat beside him throughout the performance, and definitely the only person who would even think to care why it was empty – robbing himself of night he’d been looking forward to for no good reason, but what little courage he’s scraped together has its limits, and that would be the very furthest extent of them.  
  
On the other hand, there lies hope, and he doesn’t want to lose that quite yet by hearing Lovino tell him that he’s changed his mind and decided not to come.  
  
Eventually, because there’s still time, hope wins out, and Dylan puts his phone back in his pocket.

 

 

* * *

 

  
  
When Lovino finally does arrive, Dylan almost doesn’t recognise him. The coat collar pulled up high around his chin and hunched shoulders shield most of his face from view, and it’s only the familiar angry, determined way he slams his feet down with every step as he approaches that makes Dylan give him so much as a second glance.  
  
On that second glance, their eyes meet momentarily, and Lovino inclines his head towards the theatre doors. Beyond that, he doesn’t even pause, stomping away whilst Dylan is still struggling to refurl his umbrella without any further acknowledgement of his presence, much less a greeting.  
  
Dylan can’t bring himself to care about that, however. He doesn’t even think he’d care if Lovino proceeded to not say a word to him all evening or else completely ignored his existence throughout, because he _came_. He chose to spend a portion of his precious free time in Dylan’s company, and that has to be an indication of the _something_ he was hoping for, even if it is only that Lovino doesn’t actively find his very presence off-putting.  
  
It’s not very much, but seeing as though Lovino tends to give the impression that he considers Dylan barely worthy of the air he expends speaking to him at all other times, it seems there might have been some recent yet marginal improvement in the status he occupies in the other man’s mind. Above insects and PE teachers, perhaps, though still far from the lofty heights occupied by Feliciano and…  
  
Dylan’s not entirely sure there’s anyone or anything that even approaches deserving that level of tolerance in Lovino’s world view. If there is, Dylan’s certainly never seen any evidence of it.

 

 

* * *

  
  
  
By the time Dylan enters the theatre’s foyer himself, Lovino has divested himself of his coat and become distracted by trying to smooth out the material of his tight, grey trousers.  
  
If they are crumpled in any way, the wrinkles must be so miniscule that they’re almost invisible, as Dylan can’t see any evidence of them. Therein, he supposes, lies the difference between Lovino and himself. Lovino obviously has an eye for those sorts of fine details regarding his clothing, and so he always looks impeccably dressed, whereas Dylan, who does not, often looks like the sort of person to whom strangers offer slightly pitying looks, and the odd pound coin, when they pass him on the street.  
  
Case in point, if he hadn’t known better, Dylan would have guessed that Lovino hadn’t walked through the storm brewing outside at all.  
  
His hair is miraculously dry, considering his lack of an umbrella, with just a few droplets of rain scattered across his crown, glittering like tiny jewels under the harsh lights hanging overhead. It also looks freshly styled, unlike Dylan’s own, which immediately springs forth to fall in thick tangles over his eyes the second he lowers his hood.  
  
A particularly persistent spike of it keeps prickling against Dylan’s wind-chapped nose, no matter how many times he tries pushing it back, something that makes him acutely aware of how blotchy the rest of his face must be. It’s impossible for him to step foot outside the house in anything other than the mildest of conditions without red patches blooming erratically across his skin, because it seems to be just as sensitive to the rain and cold as it is the sun.  
  
He’s the only member of his remaining immediate family to escape having red hair – though Arthur’s been in denial for years (strawberry blond; dyed his hair since he was twelve) and Alasdair’s a stealth-ginger (his true hair colour revealed only under particular types and angles of lighting) – but he still inherited the skin; milk-pale and finicky.  
  
Lovino’s complexion, by contrast, is the same clear, light olive it always is, darkened only by the faintest of flushes which seems to be perfectly placed to highlight the sharp arc of his cheekbones.  
  
In a strange way, he reminds Dylan of Alasdair. On any given day, Alasdair might give about as much thought to his appearance as he does the socio-political situation in Liechtenstein, but somehow – despite his ancient clothes, rampant stubble, and the occasional farmyard stench of him – he always manages to look rakishly dishevelled at worst, and not like someone who’s never been introduced to the concept of a mirror. His many admirers certainly seem to be no less interested in him when he looks and smells as though he’s just crawled out of a hole in the ground as when he’s made one of his vanishingly rare efforts at looking presentable.  
  
Alasdair might not notice other people’s appreciation of him, but Dylan does, and it had led him long ago to theorise that certain people simply able to pass through life seemingly unruffled by the messier vagaries of it.  
  
Thus they can appear like someone who should be starring in a film or some arty advert for expensive perfume even when they’re covered in cow shit, or slog their way through a gale and still look as though they’ve just freshened themselves up mere moments before.  
  
Even Lovino’s shoes have somehow maintained their high polish. Looking down towards his feet, Dylan notes, with absolutely no surprise, that his own shoes are still filthy despite their long exposure to the rain, as are the bottoms of his trousers.  
  
“Are you cold?” Lovino asks suddenly, apropos of absolutely nothing as far as Dylan can tell.  
  
When he looks towards Lovino questioningly, Lovino gestures towards his coat, presumably meaning to draw Dylan’s attention to the fact he’s still wearing it.  
  
Dylan’s hands have started toying with the first toggle of his coat before he remembers his harried decision to don a cardigan earlier. A somewhat shapeless green and mustard cardigan knitted by his well-meaning but – it pains him to admit it – slightly inept grandma. The jumper Lovino’s wearing is almost a perfect match for his eyes, looks soft and expensive and is just as form-fitting as his trousers, making the lines of his slender body look long and lean even though he can’t be more than an inch or so taller than Dylan himself.  
  
“A little,” he says, hastily letting go of the toggle. The coat can wait until the musical’s started, the lights have gone down and it’s too dark to see his poor choice of knitwear.  
  
Lovino eyes narrow in such a way in response that Dylan could almost believe that he can see through the thick duffle material to the unsightly cardigan beneath. The slight disapproving flare of his nostrils afterwards would certainly seem to substantiate the idea.  
  
“Been waiting long?” he asks, though the swiftness with which he turns away after speaking suggests that he isn’t particularly concerned about Dylan’s answer.  
  
Therefore Dylan feels no guilt in offering the lie that it had been: “Just a few minutes.”  
  
Unsurprisingly, Lovino gives no indication that he’s even heard Dylan speak, setting off towards the stairs which lead to the circle seats without making even a token gesture of interest.

 

 

* * *

 

  
  
Dylan was rather proud that he’d been able – slowly but surely over the near three years he’d known the other man – to wean himself off the need to babble incessantly at Lovino during conversational lulls as he does with most other people.  
  
He’s only been able to do so because he came to three very important conclusions at the end of the first week of their acquaintance.  
  
One, that conversations with Lovino didn’t involve lulls so much as conversational deserts, so long and broad that even Dylan – with all his many years of experience in supplying inane chatter – would be hard-pressed to fill them without doing irreparable damage to his larynx.  
  
Two, that Lovino appears to have very little time for conversation, full stop. He’s a dab hand at getting involved in arguments, and always has a pointed comment or two ready whenever he feels the need to deploy them, but otherwise seems perfectly content to simply subject people – or, more accurately, men; with women he's a different person entirely, one who’s full of smiles, compliments and far too many cheek kisses – to his taciturn disapproval, his eyes rolling so hard and so often, Dylan’s surprised that they’re not permanently strained.  
  
And three, that he was completely and utterly smitten with Lovino, a state of mind that instinctively makes Dylan want to mould himself into some approximation of the sort of person that he thinks might be attractive to the object of his affections.  
  
Thus, he’s forced himself to talk far less than he wants to in an effort to look like someone who doesn’t _need_ to. Sometimes, he’s had to bite down on the inside of his cheeks so hard that he’s drawn blood just to stop himself from opening his mouth, but he’s managed, he’s persevered, and Lovino hasn’t felt the need to tell him to ‘just shut the fuck up’ for _months_ now.  
  
But it’s always been difficult, and never more so than tonight, with five minutes of mutual silence stretching out agonisingly behind them and another five looming like some near-insurmountable obstacle in front of them.  
  
Dylan’s tried reading his programme, but the trembling of his hands is so pronounced that it proved too difficult to hold it steady enough that he can make out the words, and likely presented Lovino with a damning tell concerning the frazzled state of his nerves, besides. He’s tried people watching, but they’re so high up, on the backmost row of seats of the circle, that he can’t see a great deal beyond the backs of the rest of the audience’s heads, which offers scant distraction save enumerating the bald spots (seven) and ponytails (ten) within his line of sight.  
  
He can hear the faint, discordant sounds of the orchestra tuning up far below them, and doubtless if Llewellyn was there, then he’d have plenty to say about the process, about what the tonal quality of those few scattered notes suggested about the quality of the instruments that produced them, and so on, but Lovino simply sits there, programme unopened, eyes unfocused, and as tight-lipped as ever.  
  
Most importantly, though, he’s sitting far too close to Dylan. Although it’s not perceptible by looking at him, his body must be subtly angled leftwards, because Dylan can’t move his legs without brushing Lovino’s; can’t adjust the way he leans on their shared armrest without bumping elbows with him.  
  
Such contact, though fleeting, is almost constant and completely unavoidable, because Dylan’s skin and nerves and brain are buzzing from it, making the need to move an imperative one as he desperately tries to shift himself into a position that might ease the sensation.  
  
He can’t breathe without inhaling lungfuls of Lovino’s aftershave – warmer scented than the one he habitually wears for work; earthy with an undertone of musk – can’t bring himself to chance looking in Lovino’s direction lest he get transfixed by the sharp perfection of his profile, which would be so obvious as to be fucking risible with him being so close rather than the length of a room or corridor away as he usually is whenever Dylan forgets himself that badly.  
  
The combined squirming discomfort of it all makes the old, familiar pressure build in Dylan’s head, behind his eyes and at the base of his throat. The pressure he knows has only one outlet that isn’t _entirely_ mortifying.  
  
And eventually, it grows so overwhelming that he just has to open his mouth and vent it. It’s either that or throwing his hands up in defeat and running, because the only other option is allowing himself to burst into tears.  
  
(Granddad hated crying; hated it more than long, pointless stories about school, or the moon landings, or Byron’s life, or the Aztecs, so Dylan had learnt to adapt.)  
  
“I haven’t been to the theatre for years, but my Granddad used to bring me and my brothers and sister here all the time,” he says, his feeling of relief almost as strong as his disappointment in his own weakness. He’d only had three minutes left. “Well, not just here, but any theatre, really. He really loved the little one we had at the school my brothers and I went to, for some reason. The Vanbrugh? At King’s? Have you heard of it? Always donating towards its refurbishment and so on. Fancied himself a bit of a patron of the arts, I think.  
  
"Anyway, it didn’t seem to matter what we went to see: musicals, ballets, plays, even those fucking awful interpretive dance things that everyone just pretends to understand so they don’t look uncultured. We used to sit in far better seats in those days, though. A few rows back in the stalls, so—”  
  
“Is your family rich, then?” Lovino asks, his tone bland enough that the inquiry doesn’t sound quite as intrusive and prying as it could have been.  
  
It is wholly unexpected, however, and Dylan finds himself replying, even though it’s a subject he avoids commenting upon normally; the words bypassing all his usual mental filters in his shock. “Um, I suppose we were. Moderately well-off, anyway. That was years ago, though; we haven’t been for a long time now.”  
  
Lovino’s brow creases thoughtfully. “Is your granddad George Kirkland?”  
  
“Was,” Dylan corrects him automatically, even whilst he tries to parse the question. It seems odd that Lovino would ever have heard of him, coming from Macclesfield, as Granddad’s belief in his own importance was immense, but in reality its limits were circumscribed by Chester’s, if they even stretched that far.  
  
Lovino straightens up in his seat, and then leans in even closer to Dylan, his curiosity obviously piqued by what he has to say for the first time since they met. “The same one who got caught up in that whole investment scam thing?”  
  
Oh.  
  
Well, that explains everything. He’d forgotten for a moment that Lovino’s closer to Alasdair’s age than his own, that he likely watched the endless reports on North West Tonight, read the countless editorials, and updates, and biased as fuck opinion pieces in the _Chester Chronicle_ , instead of ignoring the entire sordid affair as most of Dylan’s own peers did, even the local ones.  
  
“That was him,” he says brusquely, and then attempts to change the subject. Lovino interrupts him before he even finishes opening his mouth on a comment about the blinding over-abundance of gilded moulding surrounding the stage, however.  
  
“Did they ever catch the bastard who set it all up?”  
  
“My stepfather?” The term sounds, feels, _tastes_ wrong. Robert doesn’t deserve to be called a father, in any fashion. “No, they didn’t.”  
  
“I heard—"  
  
Whatever it was Lovino had heard, thankfully, he doesn’t have chance to share it, because – to the accompaniment of a resounding crescendo from the orchestra – the lights dim and the stage curtain begins to rise, rendering any further conversation unforgivably rude if not outright impossible.

 

 

* * *

 

  
  
Dylan loves opera. He loves musicals. He loves _Great Expectations_ as a novel.  
  
He’s not entirely sure he even _likes_ this adaptation of it, which seems to be a strange amalgam of the three; one whose components are subtly out of proportion to one another.  
  
Granted, he’s hardly an expert, but most of the songs sound more like arias to him, long, poetic and highly repetitive both lyrically and thematically. Although he normally loves a great aria, it’s not what he expects from a musical – which is more along the lines of songs that make him want to hum along even if he doesn’t quite know the tune – and even if it was, he’s doesn’t think these are particularly great, either.  
  
Whilst he has no doubts that Roderich Edelstein is a highly talented composer – everything he’s written thus far in his short career has met with near universal acclaim from professional critics, every single one of whom is far better qualified to pass judgement than Dylan himself – Dylan’s struggling to take pleasure in the music even when he ignores the largely uninspiring lyrics.  
  
The review he’d read in _The Guardian_ had called it ‘experimental’ and ‘bold’, with its sharp contrasts in tone and unpredictable rhythms, but, personally, Dylan finds it jarring and strident. It reminds him a little of Shostakovich’s work, which he’s also never managed to cultivate an appreciation for, despite having applied himself to the task quite diligently over the years because Shostakovich was one of Mum’s favourite composers.  
  
Most detrimental of all to Dylan’s enjoyment, however, is the fact that the story seems to have got somewhere lost along the way. He knows _Great Expectations_ inside out and back to front after having taught it for GCSE for the past couple of years, but he’s still struggling to follow the plot, which has been reduced to a series of stilted vignettes whose sole purpose appears to be manoeuvring the performers into a studied pose at the front of the stage in order to deliver yet another pseudo-aria.  
  
When the boy playing Pip dangles himself from an elaborate piece of scenery – it somewhat resembles half an elephant made out of stylised barbed wire, but as neither one plays any part in Dickens’ original, Dylan’s at a bit at a loss when it comes to deciphering what it might represent – to start upon yet another round of plaintive, warbled ‘Estella’s instead of getting on with interacting with Miss Havisham, Joe, or anything else save the barbed wire elephant, Dylan turns to his programme in desperation, hoping for a synopsis which might outline the changes that have obviously been made to the storyline.  
  
There is, however, a complete dearth of any useful information at all in the programme, just gushing review after gushing review from people who have clearly understood whatever it is that Dylan’s failed to grasp, and, at the very back, two pages dedicated solely to the composer himself.  
  
The further he reads into the floridly written biography presented there, the more it begins to resemble textual fellatio. For every factual statement, there are at least three along the lines of ‘wunderkind’, ‘phenomenon’, or ‘genius’. By the time he reaches the end and comes face to printed face with the man himself, he feels predisposed to find fault with it out of sheer bloody minded contrariness (and, perhaps, the tiniest spark of petty jealousy).  
  
It is, however, a handsome face that stares back at him from the page. Or, rather, stares through him, as although Roderich Edelstein’s eyes are such a striking shade of dark blue they look almost purple, they’re sharp and penetrating, their harshness accentuated by the heavy black frames of his glasses.  
  
“He looks like a smug bastard.”  
  
Lovino’s whispered comment is a shock, but not so much of one as the way he leans into Dylan and taps the glossy photograph with the tips of his finger, especially as the programme is laid open across Dylan’s lap and thus he can feel the brief contact reverberating through the tense muscles of his thigh. The sensation makes him flinch so hard that it triggers both a reflexive jerk of his leg and a coughing fit, neither of which endear him to the – frankly quite terrifyingly huge and surly-looking – man sitting in the seat in front, who turns briefly to give him a reproachful look.  
  
Dylan cringes apologetically and then presses his mouth against the crook of his elbow until he’s managed to get his breathing back under something approaching control. “I think I might be smug too if I’d written a sold-out musical when I was twenty-four,” he croaks out.  
  
Lovino’s scowl, more than likely born of embarrassment due to his proximity to Dylan’s hacking, deepens yet further. “Still, he could try and hide it better.”  
  
“Maybe his face is just like that naturally. The poor man might not be able to help it,” Dylan mutters, feeling a little defensive of Roderich because the thought reminds him of Alasdair, whose expression often doesn’t fit his mood through no fault of his own. “I should ask Llewellyn about it. They went to school together, you know.”  
  
One of Lovino’s eyebrows arches upwards slightly; it’s only the tiniest hint of interest but an unmistakable one all the same. Dylan finds himself warming to the subject considerably.  
  
“I’m not sure how close they were or anything,” he confides, “but I do know he was hoping to perhaps catch up with him tonight. That’s one of the reasons he originally got the tickets, because, apparently, Roderich’s actually here, watching this performance, and—"  
  
“Would you please shut the fuck up,” the behemoth of a man in front snarls as he whips his head around. He doesn’t look surly anymore; he looks like he wants to rip Dylan’s head from his shoulders with his bare hands and then use it as a football. “Some of us are trying to listen to the fucking music. You want to gossip, take it outside, all right, mate?”  
  
Dylan stares down at the man’s hand where it’s curled around the back of his seat, the knuckles whitening. It’s monstrously huge, and looks more than capable of snapping a neck with little more than a twitch of its sausage-like fingers.  
  
“All right,” he says contritely, hunching down into his seat and bowing his head. “Sorry.”  
  
His submissive posture obviously appeases the man, who grunts approvingly before turning back to the stage.  
  
Lovino, too, seems enrapt in the performance once more when Dylan chances a sidelong glance at him, his posture exactly the same as before as though their entire exchange had never happened.  
  
Or, more likely, he’s pretending it didn’t, and Dylan can hardly blame him for that.  
  
He’s starting to think he might well get ditched during the interval.

 

 

* * *

  
  
  
By the time the curtain falls on the first act, Dylan has given up on even trying to follow the musical’s plot.  
  
His breaking point had been Miss Havisham.  
  
The actor playing her had flailed melodramatically around the stage at one point, singing some dirge-like number about her pain and suffering, and he’d thought they’d reached her death scene. When the actor reappeared for the next song, swirling around with quite obvious vitality in an outfit that very obviously wasn’t a mouldering wedding dress, he realised that not only had he obviously misinterpreted the previous scene but that the actor might not have been playing Miss Havisham from the start, rendering his entire flimsy interpretation of what had come before completely null and void.  
  
He’d started to develop a headache then, and it’s only worsened since thanks to the staccato screeching of the orchestra’s violins that had rounded out the last five minutes of music before blessed silence descended and the theatre’s lights started to brighten once again.  
  
To Dylan’s surprise, Lovino doesn’t take that as his cue to make good his escape. Instead, he gets up from his seat, stretches his arms out above his head briefly, and then asks, “Cigarette?”  
  
In the unlikely event that he wasn’t abandoned for the duration of the interval (at the very least) Dylan was going to suggest they head to the theatre’s bar first to grab a drink, in the hopes that the second half of the musical might be improved when viewed through a mild alcoholic haze.  
  
He needs a cigarette just as badly, though, and supposes the order he has them in doesn’t really matter. They’ve got time for both.  
  
“Okay,” he says, eagerly grabbing his coat.

 

 


End file.
